


Out to Pasture

by Swump (Zelan)



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Bad Puns, Broken Bones, Gen, Whump, seriously someone stop me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 17:05:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12586588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zelan/pseuds/Swump
Summary: Danny is ambushed and injured late one night. He pulls through the attack, but what about the next day?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sad_ghost_kid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sad_ghost_kid/gifts).



Danny’s always been a pretty smart kid. He’s followed the rules, kept himself safe. He doesn’t run on wet floors. He looks both ways before crossing the street. He wears his helmet when he rides his scooter.

Unfortunately for him, he probably should have been wearing more than that.

He’s not sure at first what it is that makes him fly off of his scooter, but the chances are good that it’s another ghost. He’s actually relatively calm in the moments between when he’s knocked aside and when he hits the ground. There’s no reason to believe that this should be anything other than a routine battle. And then-

_crRACK._

The sound Danny makes when he hits the pavement is somewhere between a gasp, a wheeze, and a whimper. Hot pain flares along the length of his left arm, with the worst concentrated just below his shoulder. Tears fill his eyes and he focuses on blinking them away, so much so that it takes him some time to realize that he’s been holding his breath.

His subsequent attempts to breathe evenly are cut short by a blow to the face that leaves a deep gash across his cheek. Danny jerks his head sharply away and scrabbles backwards, slowed by the fact that his injured arm is cradled tightly against his body.

Once he’s put some distance between them, Danny is finally able to get a good look at his attacker. He feels the smallest pinprick of relief that it’s not one of his more powerful enemies, just a mook, but he’s still on guard - the big bad could still be somewhere nearby. As it is, what he’s facing down now looking to be some sort of ghostly… buffalo? He doesn’t know. He got a C in Biology.

Well, whatever it is, the thing is pawing the ground with its razor-sharp hooves like it’s ready to charge. Danny’s going to have to transform, despite the throbbing in his arm.

He closes his eyes and breathes as deeply as he can. “I’m going ghost,” he murmurs, more to get himself in the right frame of mind than anything else. It takes an immense amount of willpower, but he forces his thoughts to the transformation.

The relief that comes once he’s transformed is immediate; the searing pain is replaced with a cool, tingly sensation. A cocky grin crosses his face. “Time to put you out to pasture,” he taunts, a plan already forming in his mind. He stares the ghost down, crouching as if prepared to wrestle with it.

The ghost’s red eyes narrow and it snorts angrily before leaping into a charge. The speed takes Danny by surprise, but he holds his ground as the specter bears down on him. He waits… waits…

And at the last second, he goes intangible. The buffalo doesn’t have enough time to stop - instead, it crashes headfirst into the wall behind Danny. He wastes no time in uncapping the Fenton Thermos and pointing it at the dazed ghost.

He races to come up with a witty send-off as the buffalo is absorbed into the Thermos. All that he manages is “Bye, son.” He winces at his own joke - even he knows that was bad. Are bison and buffaloes even the same thing?

He should have saved the pasture joke for the end. Now _that one_ was good.

Reluctantly, Danny turns his mind from the puns. He has a more pressing issue to deal with. How, he’s not sure, but he can’t exactly waltz home with a broken arm.

Is it even broken? He hopes not, but given the pain that he was in earlier… On a whim, Danny lets his injured left arm go intangible.

Shit. _Shit._ That’s definitely broken. He squeezes his eyes shut and inhales shakily, desperate to get ahold of himself.

Okay. He’s gonna have to deal with this no matter what.

Danny tries to mentally detach himself when he opens his eyes again to get a better look at the fracture. It looks like a pretty clean break, at least, and the bone isn’t sticking out of his skin. A closer inspection reveals that there are a few fragments of bone floating freely. Danny figures that he should try to remove those first.

Very carefully, Danny reaches into the intangible arm and closes his fingers around a sliver of bone, extracting it easily. He stares at the tiny white chip in his palm, smaller than a dime, with morbid fascination. _I just pulled this out of my own body._

Not sure what else to do with it, Danny lets it drop to the ground and goes back in for the next one. He falls into a surprisingly easy rhythm of removing the fragments, one at a time, one after another.

Eventually, all of the fragments lie piled at his feet, glinting dully in the harsh illumination of a nearby streetlight. There’s no ignoring it now, Danny knows. He’s going to have to deal with the real problem.

His upper arm bone - the humerus? - is jaggedly split a little below the shoulder joint. The two pieces are unaligned; the one connected to his elbow seems to be pointed too low.

Danny hesitates, then closes his eyes and gives the displaced bone an experimental tug. The sensation that results certainly isn’t pleasant, but it’s not quite painful, either. He can only describe it is a stretching sort of feeling, as if his muscles are slowly catching up with the bone that they’re attached to.

Time crawls by as Danny resets the bone, inch by inch. He keeps his eyes shut tight, going by feel instead of sight, forced to wait longer and longer periods of time for the muscles to match the bone. Soreness creeps into his arm despite the natural anesthesia that his ghost form seems to provide, and he dreads the agony that he knows he’ll be in once he switches back.

At long last, the edges of the snapped bones grind together. Danny opens his eyes and peeks at his arm, sighing in relief when he sees that the bones appear relatively normal. He would have appreciated a diagram to be sure, but he’s working with what he has. Which is nothing.

Only now that he’s finished setting the bone does Danny realize that he’s quaking with anxiety. He lets his broken arm return to its tangible form and lowers himself to sit on the curb, in desperate need of a chance to process the night’s events. His mind drifts to other things - how late it is, the homework that he still has to do, doesn’t he have a test coming up this week? - so that when he transforms back he does so without thinking about it.

This was a mistake.

The scorching, sickening ache tears through him anew, just as intense as the initial impact had been. Danny bites his lip to stop himself from screaming, so hard that the skin splits under his teeth and blood rolls down his chin. Nausea roils within his stomach and he tucks his head between his knees, frantically dragging air through his nose as his entire body tenses up.

Danny becomes acutely aware of the pounding of blood through his veins, almost deafening in the silence of the night. He latches onto it, grounding himself with the constant _thump, thump, thump_ until it fades away. The pain lessens alongside it - not by much, but enough to be bearable.

Danny wipes the blood off of his chin with his shirt sleeve, wincing a bit when he presses the still-fresh wound against his teeth. He stands up decisively, glad to find that he’s much steadier on his feet than he would have predicted when he leans down to retrieve his scooter using his good arm.

As he sets off for home, pulling the scooter along behind him, it occurs to him that he’d been in the beam of a streetlight the entire time. It’s a real stroke of luck that no one had walked by and witnessed all that; he’ll have to be more careful in the future.

It takes him longer than he would have liked to walk the last block home, but on the upside, the house is dark and no one bothers Danny on his way upstairs, not even Jazz. It’s an absolute relief. He’s bone-tired and not in the mood to be interrogated, and he definitely doesn’t have enough of his wits about him to make up an excuse for a broken freaking arm.

Danny melts into bed without bothering to shower or change into his pajamas. His broken arm forces him to lie uncomfortably on his right side, with his injured arm tucked tightly against his body. It’s a completely unnatural position, and despite his exhaustion it takes Danny at least an hour before he finally is able to acquiesce to sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Danny feels like roadkill when he wakes up the next morning. His left arm is the worst of it, but the rest of him is stiff and achy from the awkward sleeping position. On top of that, he’s just plain tired. It’s as if he hasn’t slept at all.

He slides out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom in a daze. His face reflected in the mirror is a miserable sight - he’s pale and drawn, and the bags under his eyes are so swollen and blue that they look like bruises. His lower lip is crusted by a messy scab, which he cautiously probes at with his tongue. The only good thing that he can say for himself is that the cut across his face is completely healed.

The rest of him doesn’t look much better. A dark streak of dried blood stains the right shoulder of his shirt, which is torn in various places from the brawl the night before. He catches sight of a dark shadow underneath his left sleeve and rolls it up, apprehensive.

A mottled mosaic of bruising in various shades of yellow, purple, and black covers a huge portion of Danny’s shoulder. He runs his fingers over the area as lightly as he can, wincing when he notices the swelling.

Danny pulls the sleeve back down. He knows that he’ll need long sleeves to hide it, but there’s no way he’s lifting his arms up to change his shirt.

It takes him a while rooting around his room with one arm to find his red hoodie, and even longer to pull it ever so gently over his injured arm. The hoodie is old and a little small, and for a minute or so Danny thinks that it won’t fit over the swollen shoulder, but finally he prevails. Once the hoodie is zipped up, the injury is well hidden.

Danny zeros in on the medicine cabinet once he gets downstairs, intent on a pain reliever. There is no way he can make it through the day without one. He’s focused enough that he doesn’t notice when Jazz comes up behind him.

“Danny?” She places a tentative hand on his shoulder - the wrong shoulder. Danny flinches away from her.

“Don’t touch,” he snaps, more sharply than he means to. Jazz obligingly draws her hand back, concern painting her face.

“Danny, you look awful. You should be in bed. Did you check your temperature? If it’s more than a hundred it’s an excused absence.

It takes a second for Danny to understand the situation. “Umm…” he stalls, mind whirring. Then it clicks. “Uh, yeah, I did, it’s only ninety-nine. Point four. Um. And I have a test today… English test. You know how Lancer is, just won’t let up on us hardworking students!”

It’s a total lie, and Danny worries that his rambling cover-up will make his sister suspicious. Luckily, she seems to chalk it up to his supposed illness.

“Okay, okay, if you say so,” she relents. “But if you get worse you need to go to the nurse so she can send you home. And here, take these. They work best for me.” She grabs a box from the cabinet and sets it on the counter in front of him.

Danny deflates when he realizes that it’s cold medicine, not a pain reliever, but he knows Jazz isn’t going to let him back out of this unless he comes clean. He scarfs down a granola bar and mentally crosses his fingers before taking a small dose, hoping that it won’t have any adverse effect.

“I can drive you,” Jazz calls from the door. “I’ll be in the car when you’re ready.” The door slams behind her.

Danny doesn’t bother trying to get his injured arm through the backpack strap as he walks out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

The cold medicine doesn’t kill him, at least, but it does make him very, very drowsy. As hard as he tries to pay attention, he finds himself nodding off, his head pillowed on his good arm. To his tired gratitude, his teachers all let it slide. Even Lancer, after an appraising look at his wan face, ghosts a comforting hand over Danny’s shoulder. “You can make this up another time,” he whispers. “Do you want to go to the nurse and take some medication?”

“I already did,” he mutters. It’s not technically a lie.

Mr. Lancer’s concerned look doesn’t lift, but he doesn’t press the issue, moving down the aisle to pass out the rest of the tests.

Danny’s sleep is fitful, disrupted by the sharp ache of his arm, which the meds haven’t made a dent in, and the noise of the students around him. He stumbles to each class more tired and disoriented than the time before. It’s a miracle he doesn’t get lost before his last period - gym class.

That miracle comes in the form of Sam, who carefully grabs Danny’s good arm and steers him towards the boys’ locker room before peeling off to go to her own. Vaguely, he recollects filling in her and Tucker on the details of last night and that morning.

Tucker finds Danny staring dully at his locker, groping for the combination to open it. “It’s all good, Danny, I talked to coach, he says you don’t have to participate. Honestly, all of the teachers know already, I’m surprised they haven’t sent you home yet.”

He gets the gist of what Tucker says to him. After his friend changes into his gym uniform, Danny lets Tucker lead him into the gym and to the wall. He immediately slumps against it, tilting his head back and drifting once again into a doze.

The class has hardly started when Dash’s voice rings out above the clattering din of the gym. “Looks like Fenton caught a cold. But can he catch _this_?”

_Catch what?_ Danny forces his eyes open, but he’s too groggy to move, not even after he sees the football spiraling through the air toward him.

Yet another mistake in a long line of them.

The point of the football connects with the break in his bone. With sickening clarity, Danny feels it displace for the second time in as many days. A choked sob escapes him, and his eyes swim with tears. This time they fall, tracking freely down both sides of his face. His jaw clenches and his teeth slice open the cut they made last night. It’s all too much at once.

_“What the hell is wrong with you, Dash!?”_ Sam’s voice, deep and throaty and fierce, like it gets only when she’s worried about something. About him.

Danny comes the the hazy realization that he’s balled up, lying facedown on the gym floor and cradling his abused arm. As black spots dance in front of his eyes, his pain and misery fade into relief.

_At least I won’t have to hide it anymore,_ he thinks, before passing out cold.


End file.
